Time and Money: It’s All About Your DAM ROI

Last year we surveyed Brandfolder customers as well as other Marketing and Creative professionals to learn more about their experience with Digital Asset Management (DAM). And right now, we’re getting ready to launch our second survey to compile new data for our upcoming State of DAM Report. As we review and update our survey questions, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on some of the responses from last Fall that stood out most to me .

One of the biggest take-aways stemming from our 2015 data collection? Marketers waste 62.5 hours annually searching for brand assets. A figure that doesn’t even include the amount of time Marketers spend creating, managing, and distributing assets. (It will be interesting to see how this statistic changes when we collect responses for our updated report.)

Another surprising finding: 60% of respondents said they did not currently use a Digital Asset Management platform. As the need for new and different content created for a myriad of different uses (in-store, on a screen, on your smartwatch) continues to grow exponentially, marketers who do not implement a system for managing all of their assets will quickly be left behind.

So beneficial

So if you don’t already have a DAM platform in place, why not? There are benefits aplenty. As our past survey respondents indicated, DAMs help users:

Easily share assets internally within their organization

Easily share assets externally with press and partners

Organize and manage all brand assets from a single location

Enforce brand guidelines and maintain brand consistency

Cease responding to one-off asset requests

If these reasons sound good to you, it’s because they are. DAMs are essential for ensuring brand consistency, saving valuable time, and increasing organization wide efficiency.

Know your return on investment

If you still don’t have a DAM, perhaps you need help selling it inside your organization. We have lots of great resources, including eBooks and Case Studies that can tell you more about Digital Asset Management. But if you want to understand exactly how DAM can benefit your company, our an ROI Calculator that will help you do just that.

We’ve provided some baseline figures to get you started, but encourage you to update the values so you get a personalized ROI calculation for your organization.

The results are divided into two sections: Searching and Asset Fulfillment. Searching gives an estimate of the number of hours your Marketing team spends locating assets. Asset Fulfillment gives an estimate of the number of hours your Marketing team spends fulfilling those asset requests. To access the calculator, just click on the screenshot below.

The amount of time spent creating (or re-creating) assets isn’t even included in our calculations; however, other research estimates, “it costs anywhere from 10-15 times the value of the original document to have to recreate it and approximately 6 times the original value to re-find it.” So the ROI of implementing a DAM system reaches much farther and includes many additional benefits over the rudimentary baselines included in our calculation.

As you’ll see, the time and cost savings of implementing a DAM are hard to ignore. We’d encourage you to utilize our ROI Calculator to understand exactly how DAM can benefit your organization. And if you’re interested in participating in our research survey for our upcoming State of DAM Report, just subscribe to our blog and we’ll email you when we start collecting data.

Jenay Sellers runs Digital Marketing at Brandfolder. As a Marketer and wannabe website designer, she understands the importance of digital asset management tools and solutions. When she's not encouraging others to check out Brandfolder, she enjoys cooking Blue Apron meals, playing golf, and curating Spotify's best new music.